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Playing the new French turn based RPG Expedition 33 - 5 hours in and it is fantastic. A breath of fresh air while also melancholic from the JRPG perspective.
Last game I played like this was Yakuza (three games ago I believe - so 3-4 years since they cranked out a sequel and pirate sequel that I just don’t have time for) which I finished and feel fondly of.
I must be a sucker for turn based JRPGs.
I'm very concerned about the comments I saw that the dodge and parry QTEs are super punishing if you fail them, to the point that many enemies will one-shot characters in that case. When the developers said they wanted to have that timing element, I imagined something like Yakuza or the South Park games - if you hit the timing right you get a nice bonus, but it's not essential. But from what others have said it sounds far more critical than that.
I read some reviews that gave me the same exact fear before trying the game out. "Oh no, it's like dark souls, except you get 1-shot if you miss a dodge"!
I'm playing on the hardest difficulty right now, about 40 hours in and there have been 2-3 fights where I felt the game really expected me to hit every single dodge. All of them optional and doable without dodging if you come back later or use specific skills. For example, I just finished off a relatively secret miniboss who is immune to fire (my entire party was specialized for fire/burn). He has a mechanic that heals him for a massive amount if he hits anyone and you're clearly supposed to dodge 100% of his moves. I missed half the dodges and still killed him on my second try, without overlevelling or cheesing him in any way. It was a challenging, exciting fight that never went into "frustrating" territory. Almost every encounter past the first few hours is like this.
Initially, the game is tough because you have very few tools. Afterwards, you get a ton of options, skills, heals and resurrects and difficulty drops off significantly. Increasing the health stat helps immensely as well (all heals are percentage based, so increasing health both buffs tankiness and healing efficiency).
Overall, I think it's a phenomenal game and would recommend it to everyone.
Thanks for your recommendation. I decided to give the game a go (since it is only $45 after all). Worst case scenario... I've spent worse money before. But hopefully I enjoy it.
Let me know what you think afterwards.
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I played through past the first real boss and missing the QTEs is very punishing. I haven't encountered a one-shot but if they're all missed you will lose. It's not an optional feature you can ignore.
There is a tutorial girl you fight and before the game starts proper you can fight her again and she has two attacks. One is easily dodged or even parried, the other was a combo of attacks that I wasn't able to dodge ever, even having failed the battle twice. The dodge/parry window feels really bad. I had to stop and look it up and someone on reddit said that the game is very punishing if you're used to dodging and parrying like it's Dark Souls because it's already too late if you're trying to hit the button the moment before the attack like how it works in more action oriented games. The main problem is a lot of the attacks work like I described the tutorial girl, they're either pretty easy to dodge or fuck I can't imagine ever dodging that.
Thankfully that side battle was harder than anything else even the first real boss. Partly because the game is in many other ways like Dark Souls. It seems designed so that everything can strictly be accomplished without leveling up at all because dodges and parries negate all damage and every enemy attack seems to be able to be dodged and parried.
The game, so far, is entirely linear with many small secret hidden areas and one side mini-boss. There are rest points that refill health, let you level up, and respawn normal enemies. Without intentionally grinding, but still searching all the dead end branches that came from the path, I was killing normal enemy groups without them ever having the chance to attack. And the first boss, I missed several QTEs against it and was still easily able to kill it without too much trouble (maybe it gets worse this boss was fairly slow in its attacks). But you seem to be able to infinitely spawn enemies and just grind levels if something is too hard. If the pattern follows what I've seen either one-shotting bosses must come much later or people are playing glass cannons because you can upgrade health and defense which I've been doing since I suck at dodging.
This does seem to have the hallmarks of most things I dislike about modern JRPGs. QTEs forced into combat, armor is cosmetic only, your equipment is basically just three slots of accessories and bespoke weapon classes for each character, extremely linear (so far), only three characters in battles (I haven't gotten that far but it looks like this is true), it takes like an hour for the game to actually get started-- but in spite of all that it's fun, the story is well told and actually doesn't waste time despite taking forever to start. Combat is fun even if the QTEs are there to enshitify it (imo). Basically in combat you have guns which let you use mana points as a single bullet and you can shoot the enemies weak points for massive damage or break down shields with them, it gives a good feeling of freedom within the combat to do a lot and I assume it gets more complex later because I have a piece of equipment that has a chance to give an enemy burn on gunshot and another that gives crit bonuses to enemies carrying burn status. It feels good that there's designed patterns of combat that give the whole thing a kind of choreographed cadence if I didn't have to dodge the enemies after it'd feel better but beggars can't be choosers.
I'm the kind of person that outright throws games away if they seem to rely too much on the timing based things in turn based systems (chained echoes, sea of stars) and this game does that and maybe worse but I don't feel like throwing it away because the story and presentation seems far more interesting and actually told by an adult to an adult and I it doesn't feel like it's yanking me around in terms of story switching perspectives, endless exposition or tutorialising. I'd definitely recommend it with the caveat that yeah the dodging is there, it's bad (half the time) and it matters way more than I'd like. I only hope that people are wrong about being one-shot by bosses and haven't upgraded their defense or health at all.
Editing because I just started playing again and the moment after I had quit and made this post the very next thing was entering into an overworld to explore so it's no longer a Final Fantasy XIII-esque hallway rpg. So, basically linear for the first hour of actual gameplay, I suppose.
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That's true. Dodging and parrying are more important against bosses. Normal enemies don't do as much damage.
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I was playing this rpgmaker horror game my brother recommended earlier this week, called Look Outside. It is phenomenal, the way the horror is presented is fantastic - it does a really good job of selling that sense of 'I don't want to look into this any deeper than I already have, but I know I have to if I'm going to survive. You play a guy who wakes up in his apartment after a terrible nightmare about the sky, and now he has the urge to go look outside, but he somehow knows he shouldn't. Instead he has to wait for whatever is going on outside to pass, which means keeping himself healthy clean and sane for at least a month without leaving his apartment building.
Basically you explore your apartment building - where people have been looking outside - for food, cleaning supplies and ways to keep yourself entertained (exploring just stresses you out for reasons that are immediately apparent when you start playing). You can of course look outside if you like - there's a window in your bedroom even, but you instantly learn why you shouldn't (in game terms it's an immediate game over) and most of the horror comes from interacting with your neighbours who have, because whatever is going on out there fucks people UP!
For an example, one morning when you go out into the apartment hallway you meet one of your neighbours who is looking for toothpaste. He has additional teeth you see, his baby daughter's crib was in front of a window when the event (remain indoors!) occurred and he doesn't know what it did aside from make her cranky, and wherever she bites new teeth grow, so his arm is growing teeth. The teeth eventually take him over, and you have to either kill him or run away, but after that you can also explore his apartment, where his family lives - his wife, baby daughter, and two sons. And let's just say they've all been bitten. That doesn't mean you have to kill them all though - after finding a plastic army man I managed to convince the mass of teeth and flesh and polyps that was the younger son to play with me, and have some fun in his final moments. It still tugs at my heartstrings now, and keep in mind I am jaded as hell.
And yeah the game is full of tragedies like that. I don't think I'm out of line saying it was inspired by the work of Junji Ito and Lovecraft, and equally inspired by the covid lockdowns, and it is a bit less frustrating than the average rpgmaker game, but it still has most of the flaws of that engine - so make sure you backup your saves just in case. But for a game made by a single guy - Francis Coulombe, who I've never heard of - it's a spectacular effort.
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I just saw it recently and can second the recommend. It looks about twice as good as Avowed wanted to be (I imagine).
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Now we have two game threads :o
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